Georges Noufflard was the first Frenchman of my own age with whom I had
been intimate and whose character I partly understood and entered into,
partly absorbed into my own. If many of the various opinions evident in
my first lectures were strikingly emancipated from Danish national
prejudices which no one hitherto had attempted to disturb, I owed this
in a great measure to him. Our happy, harmonious intimacy in the Sabine
Hills and in Naples was responsible, before a year was past, for whole
deluges of abuse in Danish newspapers.
VI
One morning, the Consul's man-servant brought me a _permesso_ for
the Collection of Sculpture in the Vatican for the same day, and a
future _permesso_ for the Loggias, Stanzas, and the Sistine Chapel.
I laid the last in my pocket-book. It was the key of Paradise. I had
waited for it so long that I said to myself almost superstitiously: "I
wonder whether anything will prevent again?" The anniversary of the day
I had left Copenhagen the year before, I drove to the Vatican, went at
one o'clock mid-day up the handsome staircase, and through immense, in
part magnificently decorated rooms to the Sistine Chapel. I had heard so
much about the disappointment it would be that not the very slightest
suggestion of disappointment crossed my mind. Only a feeling of supreme
happiness shot through me: at last I am here.
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